Tune Out

Do you ever get tired of being pushed around by technology?  At the risk of being declared a Luddite boomer, I feel that the endless treadmill of technological innovation is all just a bit much.  And calling it innovation is sort of a euphemism.  This year Windows decided that instead of its lousy “Mail” program I needed to switch over to its differently lousy “Outlook” whenever I wanted to access my emails.  Well, I didn’t want to switch.  So, every morning when I started up my laptop, I would click on the Mail icon and it would start up Mail.  But a second later the Mail window would disappear and the Outlook configuration window would pop up telling me to go through the torture of surrendering my access to my own e-mails to Microsoft.  I would then use the Task Manager to close down the Outlook program and then I would click on the Mail icon again.  I would have to repeat this ritual three times before Outlook would give up and allow me to use Mail.  But the next day it would be the same madness again.

Luckily, I used to use an open-source program called Thunderbird for my email interface.  So, I tried loading it up on my laptop and eureka! it worked.

And every few days Microsoft tells me about photographs that I loaded on my laptop last year.  What the hell!  When did I give Microsoft permission to put my photos on their damn cloud?  We really have a problem with the technology companies.  Their overreach in every facet of our on-line lives is becoming absurd.  Many years ago, I had a laptop with Ubuntu as the operating system.  I was always complaining about how everything was clunky compared to Windows and how the open-source equivalents for Word and Excel and all the other proprietary programs were weird and unfamiliar and less sophisticated.

Well, maybe I’m changing my mind.  I’m seriously considering having the computer I use on the internet, open-source.  No Microsoft, no Cloud, no nothing.  I think Elon Musk and whoever Trump puts in at the FCC should do a deep dive on the privacy problems that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest of the tech companies cause.  We’re monitored and analyzed and prodded by these companies and each time they “upgrade” their products they ratchet their control of your online existence a little more.

The latest annoyance is having to provide a secondary check on your identity through a cell phone.  Apparently, an e-mail address is no longer enough.  They need you attached to a sim card or they’re not happy.  Even Amazon wants to institute this but I’ve stoutly refused to knuckle under and, well, Jeff Bezos knows I spend a lot of money at Amazon so he’s patient.  Or maybe he’s noted my age somehow and knows that old codgers still believe that the customer is always right.  Too bad he can’t pass that idea along to Bill Gates.

Well, that’s enough complaining.  I’ll have to check into the practicality of a completely Microsoft-free internet computer.  I can’t think of an issue.  I’ll keep the programs that I use that are proprietary on a separate desk top that isn’t plugged into the internet.  In your face Bill Gates!  Commie.